![]() At the same time, he’s also the only man among a planet of billions who knows who Nora was before she was reborn into the hyphenate identity she’s maintained and expanded upon for her entire adult life. ![]() And also inconvenient.) To her, Hae Sung is every Korean guy, and maybe even Korea itself. (How convenient it is for both of these people that each of their childhood sweethearts turned out to be ridiculously attractive. ![]() Not only is it a kind of screen unto itself, but also one so impenetrable that Nora doesn’t even seem to notice how beautiful her former math rival has become as a grown man. His traditional Koreanness becomes a foreign object to her. Here is a romance that unfolds with the mournful resignation of the Leonard Cohen song that inspires Nora’s English-language name it’s a movie less interested in tempting its heroine with “the one who got away” than it is in allowing her to reconcile with the version of herself he kept as a souvenir when she left.Īs we see in the first act of this fluid but unyieldingly linear film, Nora’s family makes the decision to leave Seoul when she’s still just a kid, and that choice has such a one-way impact on the trajectory of her life that her Korean has gotten rusty by the time she reconnects with Hae Sung over Skype in her twenties. Which isn’t to suggest that Song’s palpably autobiographical debut fails to generate any classic “who’s she gonna choose?” suspense by the time it’s over, but rather to stress how inevitable it feels that Nora’s man crisis builds to a bittersweet quiver of recognition instead of a megaton punch to the gut. In practice, however, this gossamer-soft love story almost entirely forgoes any sort of “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” dramatics in favor of teasing out some more ineffable truths about the way that people find themselves with (and through) each other. On paper, “ Past Lives” might sound like a diasporic riff on a Richard Linklater romance - one that condenses the entire “Before” trilogy into the span of a single film. But then again, what could possibly be more seductive to a person in this world than the promise of divine providence? Sure, maybe she really was just using it as a pick-up line, knowing that it would give her (neurotically Jewish) future husband the green light that he needed to make a move. And with each passing scene in this film - all of them so hushed and sacrosanct that even their most uncertain moments feel as if they’re being repeated like an ancient prayer - it grows easier to appreciate why Nora invoked In-Yun on that seismic Montauk night. The closer he comes to making contact with Nora, the more heart-stoppingly complicated her relationship with destiny becomes. On the contrary, they seem to knot together in unexpected ways every 12 years, as Hae Sung orbits back around to his first crush with the cosmic regularity of a comet passing through the sky above. She and Hae Sung (“Leto” star Teo Yoo) haven’t seen each other in the flesh since they were in grade school, but the ties between them have never entirely frayed apart. Michael Mann Refused to Make ‘Ferrari’ a ‘Lengthy Biopic’: ‘Those Belong on the History Channel’īut as this delicate yet crushingly beautiful film continues to ripple forward in time - the wet clay of Nora and Arthur’s flirtation hardening into a marriage in the span of a single cut - the very real life they create together can’t help but run parallel to the imagined one that Nora seemed fated to share with the childhood sweetheart she left back in her birth country.
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